The Optical Extragalactic Background Light from Resolved Galaxies
Abstract
We discuss the ultraviolet to near-IR galaxy counts from the deepest imaging surveys, including the northern and southern Hubble Deep Fields. The logarithmic slope of the galaxy number-magnitude relation is flatter than 0.4 in all seven UBVIJHK optical bandpasses at faint magnitudes, i.e. the light from resolved galaxies has converged from the UV to the near-IR. Most of the galaxy contribution to the extragalactic background light (EBL) comes from relatively bright, low-redshift objects (50% at V_AB<21 and 90% at V_AB<25.5). We find a lower limit to the surface brightness of the optical EBL of about 15 nW/m^2/sterad, comparable to the intensity of the far-IR background from COBE data. Diffuse light, lost because of surface brightness selection effects, may add substantially to the EBL.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0011359,
title = {The Optical Extragalactic Background Light from Resolved Galaxies},
author = {Lucia Pozzetti and Piero Madau},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0011359},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
15 pages, 15 figures. Invited talk at IAU Symposium 204, "The Extragalactic Infrared Background and its Cosmological Implications", Manchester, August 2000, eds. M.Harwit and M.G.Hauser